Useful poetry techniques Flashcards
The Prelude (Wordsworth)
Simile: “As if with voluntary power instinct”
Anaphora: “No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees / Of sea or sky, no colours […]
Powerful verbs: “Towered up between me and the stars”
BLANK VERSE
Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson)
Metaphors: “jaws of Death / […] mouth of Hell
Sibilance + powerful verbs: “Reel’d from the sabre stroke / Shattered and sunder’d”
REFRAIN: “Rode the six hundred” “ Not the six-hundred”
Exposure (Owen)
Assonance + Metaphor: “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…”
Ambiguous metaphor: “For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid.”
“Slowly our ghosts drag home”
REPETITION: “But nothing happens” + REFRAIN
Storm on the Island (Heaney)
Oxymoron: “Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear”
Simile: “like a tame cat / Turned savage”
Metaphor: “leaves and branches / Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale / So that you can listen to the thing you fear”
BLANK VERSE + NON-IAMBIC BEGINNING: “We are prepared”
Bayonet Charge (Hughes)
Simile: “He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm”
Metaphors: (1) “In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations / Was he the hand pointing that second?” (2) “His terror’s touchy dynamite.”
“The patriotic tear […] / Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest
DASHES AT THE END OF SOME LINES
Remains (Armitage)
Metaphor + Objectification: “I see every round as it rips through his life.”
Juxtaposition: “I see broad daylight on the other side”
Powerful verb (+ metaphor): “and the drink and the drugs won’t flush him out.”
FREE VERSE: ‘Not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land.”
Poppies (Weir)
Metaphor: “Released a song-bird from its cage”
“A split-second/ And you were away, intoxicated”
“threw/it open, the world overflowing/like a treasure chest”
ENJAMBEMENT + CESURAE. Lower case at beginning of some lines (appears to be unintentional)
War photographer (Duffy)
“Spools of suffering set out in ordered rows”
“A hundred agonies in black-and-white/from which the editor will pick out five or six/for Sunday’s supplement.
“To fields which don’t explode beneath the feet / of children running in a nightmare heat”
RHYME
The Emigree (Rumens)
“I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.” + “I am branded by an impression of sunlight”
“The worst news I receive of it cannot break / my original view. […] It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants
“my city comes to me in its own white plane./ It [my country] lies down in front of me, docile as paper”
BLANK VERSE + RECURRING IMAGERY (“sunlight”)
Kamikaze (Garland)
“enough fuel for a one way / journey into history”
“Dark shoals of fishes / flashing silver as their bellies / swivelled towards the sun”
“Little fishing boats / strung out like bunting / on a green-blue translucent sea”
“As though he no longer existed […] this / was no longer the father we loved”
ENJAMBEMENT + RECURRING IRONY (going to bomb a boat which links to his childhood + they act as if he doesn’t exist despite him being right in front of them)
My Last Duchess (Browning)
“I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together”
“(since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”
“E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose / Never to stoop”
ENJAMBEMENT - EMPHASIS OF EGOTISTICAL TONE
Ozymandias (Shelley)
“round the decay / Of that colossal wreck”
“two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert”
“sneer of cold command”
BROKEN SONNET
London (Blake)
“I wander through each chartered street,/ Near where the chartered Thames does flow”
“blights with plagues the marriage hearse”
“The mind-forged manacles I hear:”
Tissue (Dharker)
“Maps too. The sun shines through / their borderlines”
“trace a grand design [next stanza] / with living tissue, raise a structure / never meant to last”
“If buildings were paper, I might / feel their drift, see how easily / they fall away on a sigh”
FREE VERSE
Checking out Me History (Agard)
“Bandage up me eye with me own history,/ Blind me to me own identity”
“first Black / Republic born […] Toussaint de beacon / of de Haitian Revolution
LACK OF STRUCTURAL PUNCTUATION (.,!?) + REPETITION (“me”)
